Regularly updated blog charting the most important albums of the last 50 years

Friday, August 24, 2007

351. David Bowie - Station To Station (1976)

Track Listing

1. Station To Station 2. Golden Years 3. Word On A Wing 4. TVC 15 5. Stay 6. Wild Is The Wind

Review

If you've been following this list from the beginning of the 70's at least you will already know how big a fan of Bowie I am. And again he doesn't disappoint here. There was a certain shift to R&B with Young Americans, but that was really a transition album to the much superior work that is Station To Station. Young Americans wasn't big on innovation, but here everything changes.

This is the soul and R&B album that you would expect Bowie to do, it is weird and wonderful and it is prefiguring the whole New Wave movement, his "thin white duke" character was a part of what he was doing here, a "soulless soul album". And it sounds strangely mechanical with song titles like TVC 15 while trying to stay in some kind of soul music genre.

Of course the soul music label is very loosely applied here, this is something new, it sounds like a very good album from the 80's yet it is form 1976. This is again an example of Bowie inventing a genre all his own. He had done the same in Hunky Dory and Ziggy and will again do it with Heroes and Low. This album much likeHunky Dory, Ziggy and Aladdin Sane should always be seen as a part of a trypthic in my opinion, with the other Berlin albums, I am taking Lodger out of the equation because I don't think it is nearly as good. Essential.Track Highlights

1. Wild is The Wind2. Golden Years3. TVC 154. Station To Station

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

According to biographer David Buckley, Bowie, based in Los Angeles, fuelled by an "astronomic" cocaine habit and subsisting on a diet of peppers and milk, spent much of 1975-76 "in a state of psychic terror".Stories – mostly from one interview, pieces of which found their way into Playboy and Rolling Stone – circulated of the singer living in a house full of Egyptian artefacts, burning black candles, seeing bodies fall past his window, having his semen stolen by witches, receiving secret messages from The Rolling Stones, and living in morbid fear of fellow Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page. Bowie would later say of LA, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth".

Despite the noise of a train in the opening moments, Bowie claims that the title refers not so much to railway stations as to the Stations of the Cross, while the line "From Kether to Malkuth" namechecks mystical places in the Kabbalah, mixing Christian and Jewish allusions. Fixation with the occult was further evident in such phrases as "white stains", the name of a book of poetry by Aleister Crowley. The lyrics also gave notice of Bowie's recent drug use ("It's not the side effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love"). With its Krautrock influence, it was the album's clearest foretaste of Bowie's subsequent 'Berlin Trilogy'.